Tim Ecott Persuasive Essay

King’s Leadership Academy Liverpool

Dingle Vale

Liverpool

L8 9SJ

Fraser Nelson

Editor

The Spectator

22 Old Queen Street

London

SW1H 9HP

11th October 2014

Dear Mr Nelson

I am writing to express how appalled I am about an article that I recently read from The Spectator magazine. The article ‘why we should let Faroe Islanders hunts whales’, written by Tim Ecott, shows a great misunderstanding of the barbaric event in which occurs annually in the Faroe Islands. This outdated tradition results in hundreds of innocent pilot whales being slaughtered. Whaling in the Faroe Islands continues to provoke emotional reactions from campaigners. I find the basis of Tim Ecott’s argument offensive as he tries to defend a tradition in which has been carried

He does this in a way to express his opinion. His opinion being that humans have gone overboard with the way in which they treat whales and dolphins. He’s trying to make the reader realise that in fact whales and dolphins are given human like characteristics, causing us to be blinded by the fact that they aren’t humans and that they’re not our friends. Tim Ecott realises that dolphins are intelligent animals, but he mocks the extent in which humans go in giving these animals rights. He introduces Flipper, a bottlenose dolphin who starred in an American TV series from the 1940’s. Flipper hadn’t been played by just one dolphin but five. He was portrayed at first by a female dolphin, Susie, and then replaced by another female, Kathy. ‘Flipper then went on to be replaced by three other female bottlenose dolphins known as Patty, Scotty and Squirt. What happened to those before Squirt? Where they released back into the wildlife to reunite with their family or sent to countries where dolphin meat was a delicacy? For example those in the Faroe Islands or Taiji. Later on in the paragraph, Tim Ecott reinforces how humans treat animals like their own by saying ‘Flipper and his cousins are our friends’. You can build a relationship with animals if you treat them with respect and show companionship. It works the way it does between two people, if you show that

Both events are both equally brutal. You could argue that whaling in the Faroe Islands is far worse than whaling in Taiji as those in Taiji do the butchering behind an enclose cave, whereas in the Faroe Islands the repugnant activity takes place where those are welcome to watch and participate. In Taiji, babies are separated from their mothers for sale to theme parks, but in the Faroe Islands both mothers and babies are inhumanly tortured. Hundreds of dolphins are whales are driven ashore by fishermen in boats, they do this by sticking giant poles in the ocean. They bang vigorously against these poles, assembling a giant wall of sound in which stresses the dolphins leading to them being stranded ashore. Tim Ecott tries to give the impression that the methods of whaling in Taiji are far worse, when in fact both Taiji and The Faroe Islands methods of whaling are both putrid.

The writer exaggerates about the traditional values of the hunt and the lifestyles of the natives, compared to those in Taiji, who kill for ‘food’. He says how there is a collection of 18 islands in the North sea where just 500,000 people still live a life of intimately connected to the elements. My interpretation from this is that he is trying to state that those who live on the Faroe Islands have to catch and kill their own food for